Religion and Nation-Building in the Epoch of Desecularization : The Case of Ukraine

It is a sort of truism in the sociology of religion that since the late 1970s the world has been witnessing the great return of religions, and religion has emerged as a key variable in understanding modern societies. After Peter Berger’s groundbreaking “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview” (1999), the notion of desecularization has gradually displaced secularization theory from papers describing global religious trends and the interweaving of religion and politics. Yet, while there is little doubt that religion has indeed resurged and the conception of desecularization is possible to live with, not much has been done to reveal the ways desecularization changes domestic politics, the ethno-social, identity forging etc. processes. This article explains why and how religion that was not considered by the forerunners of Ukrainian nationalism as the “Ukrainian navel” (borrowing from Ernst Gellner’s metaphor), has been resurrected as a powerful component of the post-Soviet stage of Ukrainian nation-building.